Break a Leg with associated gesture.

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: College Student (Acting)
Residence: Washington D.C. and Los Angeles
Performance Date: 04/21/2019
Primary Language: English

AC: “So we have this thing where we bite our thumb and, okay you gotta do it with me or else I’ll look like an idiot! So you bite your thumb, then link pinkies, and say ‘break a leg.’ So we mainly do it backstage like right before the show, and you go around and do it to people, and all the freshmen would be really confused, because we didn’t tell or show them it until right before the first show, and then they’d find about it and we’d go up to them biting our thumb with our pinky out expecting them to do it, until they saw other people doing it and figured it out. But then I was done with high school and we stopped doing it since it would be weird.”

Was this localized to your high school theater community, or do you know if it was more widespread?

AC: “I’ve heard of versions of it, but as far as I know my high school was the only one that did that specifically.”

So was this like a rite of passage or a form of initiation into the group?

AC: “We did it before every show, but on opening night it was the most important and was a bit of an initiation ritual.”

AC: “So imagine you’re a scared freshman on opening night and someone comes up to you like (demonstrates) and you’re confused, then eventually you figure it out.”

At some point, were you the confused freshman trying to figure out what was going on?

AC: “Yeah I remember looking around and then seeing this one girl do it and was like, oh.”

To do the gesture, one holds their hand with pinky and thumb outstretched, bites the thumb with the nail pointing down, and goes up to another person. They mimic the gesture, then hook pinky fingers together and say, “break a leg,” around the thumb. It comes out sounding slightly muffled.

Background:

AC knows about this gesture, along with its ritual aspects because of her own participation in it. She learned it from older actors and crew in the process of more generally being initiated into her high school theater community, and continued to carry out the gesture and tradition throughout her high school theater experience. Her participation was partly due to the gesture being a symbol of in-group membership. Knowing how to respond to someone else doing the gesture signifies that one has at least some experience with theater, has been part of at least one show, and as such, is part of a community.

Context:

AC demonstrated the gesture in response to my questions about the folklore of theater communities.

Interpretation:

In addition to the gesture being a marker of community membership, the learning of it is an initiation ritual. From AC’s descriptions, the first show of the year is more generally overlaid with elements of initiation rituals for freshmen and other new members of the theater community. The entire process of preparing for a performance, particularly in the days surrounding the shows, can be an ordeal of sorts, albeit an entertaining one. By taking part in the same ordeal, new members and established members of the theater community can bond through shared experience. The “Break a Leg” gesture itself is a small element of this; new members share the experience of once being confused and having to figure out the gesture with those approaching them.

Gravity Hill

Nationality: American
Age: 49
Occupation: Professor
Residence: Pasadena, California
Performance Date: 04/20/2019
Primary Language: English

JC: “Gravity Hill is a place in Mentor, Ohio, which is upa round the Lake Erie shore, north of Cleveland. And I have no idea why, how we planned the trip that got us all the way up there, four and a half, five hours up from Dayton. But we had heard about it, and I believe we had even seen it on That’s Incredible, which was a TV show that sort of anthologized folklore and weirdness and Guinness Book things and so on. So we drove up to Mentor Ohio, a group of us, in high school. And the road it’s on, I don’t remember what the road is called, but we had to look it up on a map–a paper map, cause there were no Internets, and we got to the place on the road where it was, and we had to take the car, and put it in neutral, at the bottom of what looks like a hill, and then the car slowly goes up the hill and gathers a little bit of speed. Apparently, somehow, it’s just an unbelievably convincing optical illusion, but it really feels like your car is being pulled uphill. Like it looks like it’s uphill, it really does look that way. So that’s Gravity Hill.”

Background: JC is an Ohio native. He and his friends likely heard about this Gravity Hill, or a similar phenomenon, from television.

Interpretation:

The Gravity Hill phenomenon is fairly common, and dozens of these stretches of road exist around the world. The conditions required to maintain the illusion come about naturally or unintentionally in many places in the United States, and most of these places likely have their own set of stories surrounding them, with some similarities and more variations. JC had no further information about this particular hill with regards to any stories surrounding it. This particular feature was considered just an illusion by JC and his friends.

Interestingly, there is a Gravity Hill nearby in Altadena, California, which has further folklore surrounding it. A range of ghost stories involving crashed school buses or cars of cheerleaders claim that this particular hill is haunted, and perhaps the “magnetic” effect is ghostly hands pushing your car to ensure you don’t meet the same fate as they did. A common practice of “ghost hunters” is to put baby powder or flour on the front or back of their car, and see if handprints show up while rolling “uphill.”

 

For more information on Gravity Hill in Altadena, see another local account of this gravity hill: http://uscfolklorearc.wpenginepowered.com/?p=34587

Little Mikey, Killed by Pop Rocks

Nationality: American
Age: 49
Occupation: Professor
Residence: Pasadena, California
Performance Date: 04/20/2019
Primary Language: English

JC: “Alright, so one of the most common and commonly repeated commercials on television when I was a child, in the 1970s, was a commercial for Life Cereal, in which three boys are depicted, basically at table height. And the first two boys are clearly friends, and a little older. And one of them asks the other, ‘what’s this stuff.’ And the other kid says, ‘dumb cereal, is supposed to be good for you’ (dismissively). And the one kid says, ‘well, you try it.’ And the other kid says, ‘nah, I’m not gonna try it, you try it.’ And then one kid says, ‘yeah, let’s get Mikey. He won’t eat it, he hates everything,’ his little brother. They slide the bowl of cereal  over to his little brother, and he just starts chomping it down, just like shoveling spoonfuls of it into his mouth. And then the kid who’s basically trying to punish his brother and get out of eating the cereal says, ‘He likes it! Hey Mikey!’ So Mikey, even though it wasn’t a common name, became a thing we said like all the time.

“And then we heard, maybe ten years later, that Mikey died from, um, eating Pop Rocks and drinking soda. Yeah, it was a shame. And it was one of those stories that, like, came both with people who would say, like, “I know somebody who knows somebody” or whatever attestations, and it also came, like, pre-marked as fake. But then there’d be like weird spin-offs, like ‘it wasn’t really Mikey but it was this other kid’ or, like, the actual urban legend-ness of it didn’t die, it was a real weird vibe. There was a fear underlying it, that this would happen to you. And I think at some point Pop Rocks stopped being sold for a while, and so we attributed it to the death of various children. Like some marketing decision a candy manufacturer makes turns out to be, ‘they’re killing children with Pop-Rocks and Soda!’ The Pop Rocks and soda challenge wiped out a whole generation of Midwestern boys. Yeah we all tried it. Dude, when Pop Rocks were around we put them in everything, of people’s unsuspectingly. Put them in their cereal, you’d put them on your tongue and have to like go to class with it and not open your mouth and have to let the stuff come out your nose and that was really awful. Um, yeah, Pop Rocks… the candy of death.”

So, did you have any other traditions you did involving Pop Rocks?

JC: “I mean, not really? I mean we poured them in people’s food at lunch and stuff. So we definitely messed with people with them. And we tried various things. We all, like, threw a handful of Pop Rocks in and then, like, took a swig of Mountain Dee or whatever… Mello Yello, just to see what would happen.”

Was the messing with people, was it limited to high school or middle school, or did it continue through college?

JC: “Ohh, it totally continued through college. You have to remember, our college coincided– our college years coincided with the great sort of peak in American prank phone calling culture. Like, the Prank Yankers show was on television with puppets reenacting prank phone calls. And, like, people thought this was the peak of humor. So we messed with a lot of people.”

Background:

JC grew up in Ohio. He remembers the commercial because he watched a lot of television as a child. The urban legend about Mikey and the other shenanigans involving Pop Rocks, from JC’s description, were just part of the middle American zeitgeist during the 1980s and early 1990s. The legend has no particular significance to him, other than as a memory.

Context:

The story of Mikey (or some other kid) dying from eating Pop Rocks and drinking soda is an urban legend which would be told in many situations.

Interpretation:

The story of Mikey dying has variations involving other kids, but generally involves the same story: a kid eats Pop Rocks and drinks soda, and the combination causes his stomach to inflate, somehow killing him. Among JC’s circle, the story was entirely recognized as fake, to the point where they fearlessly tried the combination which allegedly killed Mikey. It may have been the type of story to scare older, more gullible people while younger people either knew better or did not care.

Rise, Run, and Dip

Nationality: American
Age: 49
Occupation: Lawyer
Residence: Pasadena, California
Performance Date: 04/20/2019
Primary Language: English

LC: “So Rise Run and Dip was a tradition at Hotchkiss. At orientation your first year, one of the first mornings, everybody had to get up at about 6 in the morning and go for a run, and the run would be, I don’t know, 2 or 3 miles, and it would end by running down the hill, sort of from the top of campus to the bottom where there was this big lake, Lake Wononskopomuc. And you would run run run down the hill and just keep going into the lake and go for a swim. And this was in the foothills of the Berkshires, so it was generally very crisp. And then people also did this for various sports teams, like when you go for preseason practice. It, you know, it was one of those rites of passage, it was definitely difficult, and cold, and particularly unpleasant on the way back up the hill. But it was also kind of beautiful, and peaceful, and very memorable. It was meant to be a bonding exercise, something that everybody did, and that everybody at Hotchkiss had done at least once, in their time there.”

Background: Hotchkiss is a boarding school in Connecticut which LC went to for high school. This tradition has been going on since long before she went there, and continues to this day. She remembers it as a significant rite of passage that was both strenuous and beautiful.

Context: This tradition took place during freshman orientation, as well as at various points of the year for members of different sports teams.

Interpretation:

Rise, Run, and Dip is a fairly clear-cut rite of passage and initiation ritual. Through a shared ordeal, suffering in the brisk mountain air, freshmen and teammates bond with each other. The ritual is seen as important to becoming a real member of the Hotchkiss community, and becomes a shared memory of those who went through it. Additionally, LC mentioned that at the most recent high school reunion she went to, one of the scheduled events was Rise, Run and Dip. When calling back to high school days, the community recreates this event which marked the beginning of their high school experience.

Win if you can – a family proverb

Nationality: American
Age: 49
Occupation: Professor
Residence: Pasadena, California
Performance Date: 04/20/2019
Primary Language: English

JC: “The proverb is, ‘Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat.’ And I believe this was something that was said by a television character, but it had become–my father had adopted it as a life philosophy, ironically, because, while he and his father had their… tensions, at the very least, they are both stern moralizers, and so the idea that either of them would sanction any kind of cheating was inherently ludicrous. My grandfather was a by-the-books Marine; my father, while not that, was certainly not, like, a person without rules that you had to abide by. I think it might have been some sort of wrestling thing though?”

Background: JC and his family are all from Ohio. He learned this proverb from his father. On its own, the content of the proverb is not particularly significant, but the context of it and the inversion of its meaning are; they reflect the strong moral compass of his father, along with a dry, deadpan sense of humor.

Interpretation:

The proverb itself, upon further inquiry, has been attributed to various pro wrestlers, notably Jesse Ventura. He performed as a heel, deliberately playing as a villainous character meant to attract viewers’ ire. And just as Ventura the man was certainly not the villain that Ventura the wrestling performer was, JC’s father’s actual beliefs are nothing like this proverb would suggest if taken at face value.

The concept of an inverted proverb as a sort of parody of a family motto also has been passed down. My own family has said that our motto is “If you fall behind, you get left behind,” lifted from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie. The actual quote from the movie, as part of the fictional Pirates’ Code, is “any man who falls behind, is left behind.” Again, this is an entirely ironic adoptation of a proverb–just as JC’s father was the type of man to never cheat, my own family would never leave one of our own behind. In both cases, the proverb is acknowledged to be words not to live by.